Italian and Maltese rescuers found 18 bodies on an overcrowded migrant boat on Saturday and another person died while being evacuated - all apparently killed in the hold by toxic fumes from the engine, officials said. The boat, with between 400 and 600 people on board, was spotted in the night by a Danish ship south of the Italian island of Lampedusa and in waters between Libya and Malta.
The Maltese military was immediately alerted and requested assistance from Italian coast guard to help rescue the asylum-seekers from the wooden 25-metre (82-foot) boat. Two other merchant ships passing by were also scrambled. Two of the migrants were evacuated by helicopter to hospital in Palermo in Sicily in a serious condition. The survivors are being taken to Italy, while the bodies of the victims are expected to arrive in Malta on Sunday. Meanwhile a merchant vessel, the Panamanian-flagged City of Sidon, arrived in Porto Empedocle port in Sicily on Saturday with 61 migrants on board - the survivors of another shipwreck tragedy close to Libyan waters.
Their boat was found on Thursday 36 nautical miles north of Tripoli and it sank as they were being rescued with 102 people on board, meaning that 41 are feared dead. The survivors were from Gambia, Ghana and Mali. Another merchant ship, the Liberian-flagged Jamila was also headed for Porto Empedocle with 206 migrants on board.
A navy warship also on Saturday arrived in the port of Salerno with 2,186 migrants rescued in recent days, hailing from Egypt, Eritrea, Ghana, Somalia and Syria. The navy said on its Twitter account that a second warship had begun another rescue of a migrant boat south of Lampedusa, which is Italy's southernmost point and is closer to the African continent than mainland Italy.
There has been a sharp rise in migrant landings in recent weeks because of the calm summer weather and growing lawlessness in Libya, with hundreds of migrants now being intercepted by Italian authorities every day. Around 80,000 migrants are now believed to have landed in Italy so far this year - higher than the previous record of some 60,000 arriving in 2011 at the height of the turmoil triggered by the Arab Spring revolutions.